Stepping onto the site of a physics laboratory, you might expect to see enormous accelerators, ultra-powerful supercomputers, or scientists in lab coats racing between experiments. At one lab, however, what you will actually see are goats.
Deep in the woods of Minnesota, close to the Canadian border, particle physicists hope to construct the next neutrino experiment on a secluded piece of land, fit for studying a lightweight particle that was, itself, once ignored.
Graduate students acclimate to sparse levels of comfort, but present and former Fermilab doctoral students Matt Leslie (Oxford University, CDF), James Monk (Manchester University, DZero), and Simon Waschke (Glasgow University, formerly CDF) are reaching for extremes: Taking a 1987 Renault purchas
After the discovery of a new elementary particle 10 years ago by Fermilab's CDF and DZero detector collaborations, a group from DZero threw a party. Between bottles of bubbly celebrating the top quark's detection, a contest of brains was in full-swing.
Few periods in history were shaped by science as much as the 1950s. The Cold War was in full swing. The space race was finishing its first lap with Sputnik's launch. The Manhattan Project remained fresh in everyone's minds.
Nature provides three kinds of neutrinos. In the last ten years, physicists have gathered increasingly strong evidence for neutrino oscillations, the transformation of one kind of neutrino into another one.
The weak force is responsible for the decay of matter: unstable particles made of heavy quarks and antiquarks decay into particles made of their lighter cousins.
